Eurobodalla beaches: One tree beach

Tags

memory, One Tree Beach, rockface, silhouettes, sunrise

This is a beach that spans multiple autobiographies, and ghosts scenes from my past that are etched in my usually noncapacious memory. Here first are the snapshots in words.

1

It’s late afternoon. I’m coordinating a writer’s workshop for students in the Eurobodalla. The guest writer and my co-coordinators are staying in the caravan park between the beach and the entrance of the Tuross River. We are sitting around, eating and talking about the day and how we might need to change tomorrow. I’ve resisted this workshop: every time I began thinking about organising it a steel shutter came down in my mind. I could see it, and hear its clang: I couldn’t fathom why there was such resistance. Shortly after this I decide to retire.

2

It’s midday after heavy rain. We’re walking along the sand stretching from the Blackie’s caravan park to the outlet of the river when we see a crowd gathered. Of course we head along to sticky beak and discover a huge machine beginning  to move the sand that has settled across the river mouth, raising the level of the lake and warming it to a smelly, and as far as fish are concerned death-dealing, 23°. Dolphins trapped inside are languishing. There’s quite a gathering from both sides, people we’ve known forever have walked across from the Tuross side, and old acquaintances gather on the Potato Point side. We chat, as the machine sets about its work. The people from the north are watching particularly carefully, because they need to cross back or face a very long walk home. But everyone paying close attention because we’re all there to see the dramatic moment of breach.

3

It’s the middle of a grey splattery-rainy day. This is the end of a morning of flood tourism. The other two members of the tour group are no longer interested and we’ve left them behind to walk home. We’ve already watched the river whirl over the bridge near J’s place and race under the bridge across the highway north of Bodalla. It’s been raining heavily for days and the Tuross is churning furiously as it empties floodwaters into the ocean. My Queensland son and I stand on the edge, watching the swirling fury, the waves coming back on themselves as river meets surf.

4

It’s a placid sunny day with a stiffish breeze as the eye of memory looks across the river opening to the lake and spots a sailing boat, a clumsy looking object, with a tarpaulin sail. It’s tacking and twisting, he manoeuvring, she sitting and looking apprehensive. J’s been a boatman since he was 7, I haven’t mastered nautical nonchalance, even if the lake is neither deep nor wide. But we’re skittering along and the speed becomes exhilarating,

5

Another day, mid afternoon. A group gathers, clustering in changing patterns. If you watch closely you’ll see that there’s an odd hybrid of familiarity and hesitation as people talk and move on. There’s a hint of the hippy in long hair and long skirts, and a sombreness that’s rare on a beach. Slowly you figure out that they’ve gathered to farewell someone. The groups fall silent and remain near a rocky outcrop while the family gathers out of sight and swirls the ashes of our friend into the water.

Places have their own histories, but they also acquire the history of people who visit. These are my ghosts, my remnants, my shadows, traces of my past. These are the shards of memory I take to One Tree Beach at daybreak.

As you might expect, if you visit this blog often, I spend an inordinate amount of time doting on rockface. This morning is no exception, although the stranded tree and the possibilities of silhouette also draw me, as does the encroaching golden light.

Once I’ve had my fill of the shady end, I head off into the morning light towards the mouth of the river, and sit on a log watching a woman far more daring than I clamber along the headland which will give her a view uninvaded by caravan parks.

Then I do my own tamer version of scramble and cross the piles of driftwood to explore a rocky outcrop.

The patterning of rock here is astonishingly diverse so I employ a modification of “every 20 steps a photograph” called “every step a photograph.”  I can’t even limit myself to one every step. Fortunately the outcrop is not very large.

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I stand in front of the lifebuoy (ring buoy, lifering, lifesaver, life donut, life preserver, lifebelt, kisby ring, perry buoy) and take in the view: out over a benign-looking sea to a low bank of cloud, and south towards the Potato Point headland.

As I walk back along the beach I feel a presence behind me, keeping pace. I’m briefly fanciful and imagine it’s ghosts from the past, but in fact it’s my inordinately long shadow.

One Tree Beach is at the mouth of the Tuross River in the township of Tuross Heads, north of Potato Point. Take the turnoff from the highway south of Moruya, and turn left when you reach a T intersection. The road takes you along the waterfront until you reach a car park marked by a single small pine: someone killed the grand pine and this one replaced it. There is a picnic area and a lookout and ramp access to the beach.

RegularRandom: 5 minutes with chives

Tags

chives, RegularRandom

Finally, I get around to weeding my deck herb-box and discover some extremely tenacious chives which have flourished through a year of neglect and a determined invasion by grass. As soon as I see the seed heads, I know I’ll be photographing them. And then I remember my veteran 3 megapixel camera which knocks the socks off my Sony cult camera when it comes to closeups. So I spend five minutes amongst the dew-damp leaves, leaning on the dew-saturated deck railings, to see what I can capture. I can’t even remember how to switch the camera on at first and then I forget to press macro, but eventually I get going. Here are the results: none of them have been post-processed except for a bit of  gentle cropping and the black and white conversion which saves a flawed photo. I play around a bit with early light: some photos are taken in my shadow, and the  sun rises slowly behind my callistemon as I photograph.

NB I didn’t count remistressing my gear in the five minutes DJ allows for her RegularRandom challenge. Go to her site to see what she and other contributors favoured with their attention this week, especially if you need dessert after a meal of chives.

Eurobodalla beaches: Dalmeny

Tags

Aboriginal connection, Dalmeny, history, rocks, whales

There are people about today: playing in teams with some kind of throwing thing on the beach; splashing in the water where Mummaga Lake enters the sea with a rush; fishing placidly from the rocks; clambering around with bucket and spade; picnicking on the grass; watching an infant take her first steps; and staggering around watching every footfall amongst the pools and slashes of rock poking out of the sand, camera at the ready. 

This beach is just in front of a caravan park, still occupied by school holiday makers. It’s the peak of low tide, so the rocky platform is exposed and the sand firm. This is my third unfamiliar beach in a week, and they couldn’t be more different. What is the essence of this one? Shingle consisting of bigger shells than I saw at Plantation Beach, or McKenzies. Rocks piled up into a rounded turret or weathered to the shape of Opera House sails. Seams of white quartzlike rock wandering their way through the surface and crevices of their host. Narrow vertical ridges. Gleaming mustard-yellow slabs with smooth hollows.  Rockpools, and rock-dimples filled with shells.

That’s my narrow world, at noon on a particular day. But there are other worlds here too.

Geology has been busy for eons, shaping the shoreline and its beauties, making it unique. Weathering and the repetitious action of the sea are co-creators of all the shapes and patterns that have given pleasure to the tiny dot in the universe that is me.

Yuin Elder, YIrrimah evokes the Aboiginal world: “We’ve got totems here. Our sisters swim through the rocks. The whales, the seabirds, eels, crabs, they’re our family.” An information board lists Aboriginal names: maara maara, waagal, junga, yannga, bimbulla, wondarma, mingo. (What whitefellas call sea mullet, blackfish, octopus, lobster, Sydney cockles, appleberry, grass tree.)

Migrating Humpback whales come in close to shore on their long journey north to breed in the tropics in winter and then back to the Antarctic summer feeding grounds. If you’re lucky you can see them spouting and breaching, sometimes mother and baby playing together.

William Mort brought the whitefella world of sheep and dairy cows here in the 1880s. He settled land behind the beach and along Mummaga Lake, now State Forest and the suburb of Dalmeny, named by him after his Eton schoolfriend who became Lord Dalmeny, an obscure British Prime Minister.

Intrepid camping holiday-makers began coming in the 1920s, although by then Narooma just down the coast was a holiday destination with some pretty classy guest houses. This influx continues: a number of people I meet holiday here for years before they make it their retirement home, and the population swells dramatically over summer.

And then there are the current holiday makers, grabbing the last of the warmth, and me on my mission to visit every beach in the shire.

Dalmeny is the next beach down from Potato Point: to access it take the Tourist Drive turnoff from the Princes Highway about 8 kilometres south of Bodalla, until you reach the caravan park. There’s some confusion about the name. My coastal bible, Beaches of Batemans Bay and the Eurobodalla Coast by Peter and Manuela Henry, calls the northern part Brou Beach with Dalmeny in brackets: and the southern part (where I photographed for this post) Josh’s Beach. Names in this coastal strip seem to be mutable.

Postcards from the past: Cairo museum

Tags

Cairo markets, Cairo museum, Postcards from the past

January, 1998

The Cairo Museum is just around the corner from my daughter’s apartment. En route, we pass many men with guns, a response to the recent Luxor massacre. I spend most of my first visit downstairs amongst porphyry, marble and granite … statues, sarcophagi and goblets … white and grey and brown and huge. My liking for smaller things asserts itself: flint knives; pots and beads; cuneiform tablets with the delicacy of their massed script, the clay envelopes, and the matter-of-factness of their inscriptions: “My daughter is now old enough to marry. Before, you sent my servant back with a pretty good present fast. Now it’s time to claim my daughter.” These things are more manageable than statues and columns.

I leave the basement and walk up an immense flight of marble stairs, past framed papyrus, to the golden beds of Tutankhamen. There are Carter’s photos at the opening of the tomb, and I am in the presence of the treasures he unearthed, familiar from my adolescent interest: the gold shrines, the inlaid box for clothes, the box of canopic jars, the gold and jewelled throne.

It’s Ramadan and museum closes at early. No polite requests to leave or bells ringing here: guards herd people out by clapping their hands.

When I return to the museum, daringly alone, I begin my explorations in a dingy gallery of mummiform coffins, space shared with electric fans on shopping trolleys. My eye is caught by clothing – sandals; linen robes belonging to a priestess; and food – bread and biscuits. I take in the dioramas of life in the 16th Dynasty: women weaving linen; men counting cattle; soldiers; boatmen. I revisit the Tutankhamen gallery where all the small stuff is luxuriantly displayed. The mummy jewellery is laid out as it would be in the layers of wrappings. There is a helpful guard who hurtles me from exhibit to exhibit, until I sit on the floor stubbornly and begin copying hieroglyphics from a wooden sarcophagus. It works and I’m left in peace to wander. I stand for a long time in front of my favourite item: Tutankhamen’s ecclesiastical chair, with its duck legs and subtle richness of design and colour.

We spend the afternoon in the market. There is mania in the air: men dance on tables, turning prices into rap, accompanied by rhythmic banging on a 44 gallon drum; sellers rip T-shirts out of plastic wrap and hurl them towards the crowd. We buy macaroni out of a big hessian sack and finally reach the street of tentmakers where carpets are unrolled and spread out for us. We don’t buy.

After pasta and packing we catch a taxi to the station en route to Luxor. I almost guillotine my daughter, knock the mirror on another car askew and squash my hot sweet potato between my fingers. My daughter swears none of this would happen if I travelled  light.

Wordless walks: Cuttagee Beach

Tags

beach plants, Cuttagee Beach, shells, tideline

Hotchpotch 4

Overlooking the Bega Valley

Bega buildings and streetscape

Wallaga Lake and birds

Prudence Flint “Shower” – oil on linen: overlooked amongst the Archibald finalists

Driftwood

 

Seat amongst the Norfolk pines, near Plantation Beach

 

Eurobodalla beaches: Plantation Point

Tags

Plantation Beach, rocks

For the first time since I came home, I need my spotted gum walking stick as I feel my way down the narrow track to this beach of boulders. It’s like no other beach I’ve seen on my coastline: the rocks are large and chunky, with only occasional patches of sand, shingle, and shell debris. Some are rounded-rectangular, some smooth and eliptoid, some pitted and honeycombed, some patterned with apricot shapes or whitish splotches. Many carry an embedded line that wanders over gaps. Sometimes oyster shells cling to their undersurface, or a dead crab lies orange and exposed. It’s low tide and I clamber cautiously out onto the flatter slabs closer to the sea, where green weed grows luxuriantly and a living crab scuttles for cover.

I return to the track, uneasy through grass. It’s steeper than I remember and paved with elegant interwoven droppings of Norfolk pines. As I walk back towards the car, I realise I’ve edged my way north and staggered up a different track. I walk into a plantation of grand pines, not exactly natives, but providing pleasant deep shade and wonderful bark. My son tells me such trees were used as navigation markers for ships at sea.

The Archibald in Bega

The Archibald prize is awarded annually for a portrait by an artist living in Australia. The subject is usually someone prominent in the arts, science or politics: the founder (the Archibald was established in 1921) would probably be startled to find chefs in this celebrity mix. As well as the main prize of $AUD100 000, there is a much more modest packing room prize, and a people’s choice prize. I realise again what a rich life I can live in country Australia when I discover that the 2016 finalists in this prestigious exhibition are on show in the Bega Regional Gallery, a mere hundred kilometres from home.

I’m interested in portraiture, how it reveals a person, and what it might tell me about writing portraits and biography.  I head off down the familiar coast road, past the site of the Four Winds festival, stopping for a walk along Cuttagee Beach.

The gallery is small and spacious. There aren’t too many people around, and there’s a comfortable bench in each room for seated contemplation. With each painting there’s an illuminating artist’s statement, telling the story of both subject and painting process; and a question for children, asking them to look at something specific. To cater for the other end of the age demographic, the artist statements are available in a large-print booklet. On the Archibald website a short video in sign language accompanies each painting.

I prowl around, following the empty spaces in front of paintings. I note the ones I’m drawn to, and also that there’s no pattern, except that I prefer complexity over simplification. I notice how much of the body is shown: head only, head and shoulders, to the waist or just below, the whole figure. I notice backgrounds: mere and not-so-mere paint, detailed setting, a blurry landscape. I also find myself oddly drawn to conceptual paintings: two that I categorise thus are self portraits.

How can I curate my impressions? Maybe I’ll take a hint from pop song charts and work my way from least liked to favourites.

This lot have faces too blank for my liking, or is it too artificial? I don’t have the urge to meet the subjects, or to look deeper into the paintings.

Kate Benton “Claudia”; Belinda Henry “Louise Olsen”; Sally Ross “Roslyn”; Carla Fletcher “Twin souls”

The next four all appeal to me because they create a powerful context for their subjects. Troy Grant is a NSW politician and former policeman who wanted to be represented in the place he loves best. He’s dressed in clothes that reflect the palette of harvested fields. His policeman’s cap and rosary are a reminder that as a policeman he led an attack on child sexual assault in the church. This prompted me to wonder what symbols subjects of my portraits, written or photographed, might hold to capture an essence of themselves: indeed what I myself might hold.

Mark Horton “Troy” – acrylic on canvas

These two women, Pamela Easton and Lydia Pearson, are fashion designers in partnership, and they are enfolded in their textiles, a real gift for an artist who often paints vibrant detailed patterns.

Monica Rohan “Easton Pearson” – oil on board

Sam Harris is a fashion model from the Bundjalung people, traditional owners of land in north-eastern NSW. The artist arranges her studio with things that speak of Harris’s interests, and then inserts her into the set after only two sittings. She borrows the pose from Manet’s “Olympia”.

Zoe Young “Sam Harris” – acrylic on canvas

A businessman and generous arts patron, Pat Corrigan is shown rising from his desk, in front of part of his impressive art collection. The colours of his hands and face look bizarre close up, but create a person full of character and echo the colours in the background paintings.

Alan Jones “Pat” – acrylic on board: collage on 151 pieces of wood

The composition of this one is what takes my fancy, a half figure and negative space. I’m also amused by the setting: the chef holding a toilet roll and sitting on the loo, which is the ultimate destination of all her hard work.

Daniel Butterworth “Annie Smithers” – acrylic on board

I find myself drawn to two paintings because of the concept as much as the artistry. McWillams portrays species who have destroyed the Australian landscape, including man, represented by a self portrait in the style of the 16th century Italian Renaissance painter, Giuseppe Arcimboldo. The animals are beautifully painted: the artist wanted to show their innocence, despite their depredations in an environment not theirs and not of their choosing.

Michael McWilliams “The usurpers” – acrylic on linen

I’ve encountered Imant Tillers many times and have always been a bit puzzled by his art. This time, he provides a gateway in. He calls this painting a visual poem, and explains that it came about when he finally had to acknowledge that he exists as a “self”. Suddenly it becomes accessible, and I wonder whether I could construct a similar account of my “self”, making use of photography. I immediately acknowledge that such an attempt would be guaranteed to show me just how complex “Double reality” is.

Imants Tillers “Double reality (self portrait)” – acrylic and gouache on 64 canvas boards

The paintwork in “Terry Serio” is glorious, thick and textured: the palette elegant: the subject relaxed and perfectly placed against a geometry of horizontal and vertical lines: 

Clara Adolph “Terry Serio” – oil on canvas

Maybe my delight in “Lucy and fans” is the result of imprinting because it’s the first painting I see as I enter the gallery: it doesn’t hurt that these birds have been rescued from a future as animal food at Mogo Zoo. The perspective from above allows the birds to show off their characteristic fans, and portrays Lucy surrounded by creatures she loves.

Lucy Culliton “Lucy and fans” – oil on canvas

The two paintings I keep coming back to are both portraits of anguish.

“The cost” portrays Craig Campbell who intervened in a violent mob attack on a train during the infamous Cronulla race riots in 2005. He now suffers chronic PTSD and needs a carer. The colours, the downturned eyes, the wrinkled ravages of his face convey the damage he suffers from his act of courage.

Abdul Abdullah “The cost” – oil and resin on board

Garry McDonald is an Australian comedian who suffers from  anxiety and depression. This painting captures the pain and inwardness in which he lives during dark episodes: the stillness, the greyness, the unreachability, the isolation, intensified by stormy grey cloud-like background.

Kirsty Neilson “There’s no humour in darkness” – oil and spray paint on canvas

The winner? Go back to the first photo of the gallery. That small one against a black background is it: Louise Hearman’s “Barry”, a portrait of Barry Humphries in oil on masonite.

The packing room winner is hidden around a corner and hard to photograph.

Begin Fauves-Ogden “George Calombaris, Masterchef” – oil on linen

The people’s choice is almost impossible to see whole, overlaid as it is by reflections in the glass. Deng is a former child soldier in the Sudan, a refugee and now a human rights lawyer. He is depicted almost photographically against a plain background, from the shoulders up, wearing a white shirt.

Nick Stathopoulos “Deng” – acrylic and oil on linen

You’ll probably notice that I’m a sucker for a story. I wonder how much of my pleasure comes from story and how much from artistry.

RegularRandom: Five minutes with a currawong

Tags

currawongs, RegularRandom

Birds have been one of the joys of my return home. This currawong, unlike the brown pigeon who likes my front deck, wasn’t at all perturbed when I stepped out the door. He was pecking away at the water on the table, and then hopped up onto the railing to scrutinise the pink sheet I was desperately trying to get dry between showers. Eventually he was joined by three mates in the bottlebrush, who tilted their heads sideways, looked knowingly at me, sang their beautiful song, and flew away. My son tells me they sometimes go into his room to steal the dog food.

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For currawong song, listen to this. Not my video, but absolutely my experience the day of the RegularRandom shoot.

My inspiration for this post is DesleyJane’s weekly challenge, RegularRandom. She asks you to spend five minutes with one subject and photograph it in as many ways as possible. For far more expert and technical takes on this challenge have a look here. I haven’t been very experimental – it was enough of a challenge to find a willing avian subject.

 

Every twenty steps: a celebration of the earth

Tags

bark, bush track, fungi, grass, leaves, spotted gums, wattle

I want to be in the bush, I don’t want to drive far, I’m fearful that closeby familiar bush won’t offer me anything. I’ve had that fear before, and it’s never justified. I decide to stop every twenty steps and photograph whatever offers itself. I’m astonished at the results. OK! So I don’t obey my own rules absolutely: sometimes I go a few paces back or forwards. Sometimes I’m forced to stop before the regulation 20 by something irresistible. Whenever I look around and think “Rats: just more dead leaves”, I find a couple of small hakeas, a mushroom shoving up the dead leaves, black resin which looks like a skeleton, a curl of bark around a stick. Always something. Old acquaintances: bark, flowers, fungi, desiccated leaves, traces, tracks, spotted gums. And new subjects: bush layers; landscape seen through a veil of foliage; grasses and fern. I even manage to catch birds at play in a string of mud pools.

Here’s the haul from my first “every 20 steps” photo shoot. And no. It is NOT the beginning of a series! Maybe the beginning of a habit, but not a series. Definitely not a series.